


Your Heart Is Your Masterpiece

by bella_my_clarke



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Bellarke, Clarke paints, F/M, bellamy watches, bellarke future fic, bonding ensues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-02
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-09-03 18:30:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8725612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bella_my_clarke/pseuds/bella_my_clarke
Summary: She swallows. “I thought maybe it would help. To have you here.”
Bellamy takes a long moment to respond, trying to process everything she’s said. It feels a little like wading through molasses. “You mean....”
“It’s just, obviously not all of these memories are happy,” Clarke rushes to say, not letting him finish. “And it’s difficult, sometimes, to go back to those and express what they felt like. But I think—maybe if you’re there with me, it won’t be so hard.”
Or: Clarke paints, and Bellamy watches her, and then it becomes something more.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [forgivenessishardforus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgivenessishardforus/gifts).



> title comes from the song I'll Keep You Safe by Sleeping At Last. it gives me feelings

Bellamy knows Clarke can paint. She does it all the time, especially after settling back into Arkadia when peace finally wins out. She draws happy memories, usually—Jasper and Monty sitting by the fire, laughing as they share a high five; a sunset as it falls over the forest with every color that ever existed on display; her new room in Arkadia, filled with her things and a few of Bellamy’s.

At least, it’s the happy memories she shows him; there are dozens of pages he hasn’t seen, and the nightmares that send him into her room almost every night have to go somewhere.

He’s seen her drawings plenty of times, but he’s never seen her _while_ she’s done her art, besides a rough sketch of him she did once for fun. (She called it rough when she handed it over, at least, but it’s one of the best drawings Bellamy has ever seen, and the bright, almost loving way she had drawn him makes his heart ache. It rests in his drawer, folded carefully so it won’t get ruined when he’s not looking at it.) She doesn’t even talk about it much unless he asks, which is maybe why he’s so surprised when she suddenly drops the deck of cards they’d been playing with and asks, “Do you know anything about art?”

Bellamy frowns and tilts his head a little. “Besides that my best friend has enough talent for the both of us? Not much.”

“Oh. Okay.” She pauses, seemingly waiting on a good transition to whatever she wants to say, then just blurts out, “Can you help me with something?”

“Of course,” he says, surprised she feels the need to ask at all. “What do you need?”

“I need to you to—well, it’s sort of a long story, but I need you to start coming to the art room every day during our break instead of my room,” Clarke says hurriedly.

He frowns, bemused. “Um, okay. Why’s that?”

“I’ll tell you when you get there, okay? Starting tomorrow.” And then she picks up the deck and continues shuffling, as if nothing happened.

When he comes into the art room the next day – which, by the way, is really only set up for Clarke, because Abby and Kane have a massive soft spot for their daughter – his first impression is she must want him to help her clean, because the place is a _mess._ Half-finished art projects are everywhere, and the once plain walls and floor are covered in long, sloppy paint strokes from when Clarke couldn’t care enough to test out color patterns and matches on a normal surface. Bottles, palettes, pencils, and other art tools he can’t name are strewn about in a haphazard mess no one could possibly sort through.

Except Clarke, apparently; she’s sifting through the materials like she knows exactly where everything is when she notices his entrance. She smiles, a little shyly, and wipes her dirty hands on her shirt (he’s realizing more and more why she steals all his shirts; hers must all be paint-stained). “Hey, Bellamy. I was worried you had forgotten.”

That’s a sure sign she’s nervous about something; Bellamy’s five minutes _early._ Plus, she keeps shifting her gaze and fiddling with her hands like she’s unable to sit still. “No, didn’t forget,” he says slowly. “What do you need again? I don’t think you specified before.”

“Oh! Yeah,” Clarke says, wringing her hands together. “I’ve been given a new assignment by my mom. She wants me to...record-keep, for lack of a better term.”

“Okay. How does that tie into the art room?”

“She thinks it would be beneficial for future generations if they had visual memories of our time on top of stories. So....” She gestures vaguely to the space around them.

“You’ve been commissioned to paint our history,” Bellamy finishes, piecing it together—except one thing. “But then why do you need me?”

Clarke tries to hide it, but his words make her flinch a little bit. “Well, for one thing, between the two of us we nearly cover the basics of what’s happened since we were brought down to Earth. And....” She swallows. “I thought maybe it would help. To have you here.”

Bellamy takes a long moment to respond, trying to process everything she’s said. It feels a little like wading through molasses. “You mean....”

“It’s just, obviously not all of these memories are happy,” Clarke rushes to say, not letting him finish (which he doesn’t mind, because he didn’t know where he was going with his sentence). “And it’s difficult, sometimes, to go back to those and express what they felt like. But I think—maybe if you’re there with me, it won’t be so hard.”

“Oh,” he murmurs, a little awe-struck. His heart aches in a good way. “That’s—thank you, Clarke.”

“For what?” Clarke asks, straightening.

“For thinking of me like that.”

She softens, and his heart melts a little more. “Of course, Bellamy.” Then she gets a determined glint in her eye. “Well, we have a lot of history to get through, right? Let’s get started.”

They pull out a fresh canvas (he’s amazed it’s able to stay untouched in this room) and set it up on an easel, then decorate a palette with a variety of vibrant, earthy colors. This painting is of their first moment out of the dropship, which isn’t quite so sad of a moment besides in the nostalgic remembrance of back when their lives were simple. They were so young then—but also so far apart, and Bellamy thinks that trade-off is more than enough for him.

Clarke paints the scene with an almost unrealistic amount of color and vibrancy and life, but it’s accurate to how they felt stepping out of that dropship after a whole life in space, so Bellamy just smiles and nods whenever she asks if she’s getting it right.

That one is done by the time the break ends, but the next few take much longer—these ones are intricate paintings, full of people and regrets and darkness. At first Bellamy just sits beside her, a constant presence, then he sets his hand on her back. She flinches, and he nearly pulls away, but then her muscles relax against his hand and she keeps painting without further comment. He leaves his hand there and suggests details when needed, trying not to think too much about how warm her skin is through her shirt.

Little by little, they move through their history, reliving moments they’ve both avoided often. They both express the hallucinations they experienced back when they were first working together – Clarke looks like she’s going to cry the whole time she paints his; he’d never told her the story, and even though she must’ve understood what he felt like back then, it still seems to break her heart – and the carnage of the battle against the grounders. Their reunion is a happy picture in a sea of blood and fear and confusion, as is their conversation by the fire that night. (Bellamy secretly thinks about asking if he can keep the painting, but it’s etched in his memory enough he knows he doesn’t need to.)

On and on they go, with Bellamy tracing patterns on Clarke’s back to give her stability and sometimes forcing her to take a break when the memories become so stark and real she can’t even hold the brush still. She’s takes weeks to finish the moments when Finn and Lexa died, and the number of times he has to calm her down in the middle of the night increases exponentially in that time. _I’m still here, I’m still here,_ he tells her over and over again, holding tightly onto her as she shakes against his shoulder. _Not everyone’s gone._

When they’re not thinking about art, Bellamy also senses a shift. They find even more excuses to do work together, and Bellamy realizes after a while they’ve developed the habit of needing to be touching in some way, whether it’s interlocked fingers or brushing shoulders. He thinks about Clarke almost all the time when they’re apart, and sometimes when they’re together he wonders what it would be like to run his fingers through her hair, or kiss her. These are the thoughts that make him flush bright red; before, when they were at war with one thing or another, he didn’t find controlling those thoughts so difficult, but now they intrude constantly, maybe because now he has a chance at a future with her. He could grow _old_ with her.

A long, long time later, Clarke finishes the last painting; Bellamy watches with unconcealed awe the intricacy of her strokes, the emotion she manages to convey. She does her typical scribbly signature in the bottom corner, then leans against Bellamy’s side with a huge sigh. “It’s done.”

“For now; in a year they’ll probably ask you to keep going,” he reminds her, smiling as he wraps an arm around her waist easily.

“Thanks for doing it with me,” she says, craning her head to look at him. Her breath fans across his face, and he’s struck dumb for a moment at how close they are.

“Thanks for being there for everything else,” he replies, squeezing her side reassuringly.

She nods, slowly, then pauses. Bellamy can only stare, transfixed by the bright specks of color in her blue eyes, and the slight parting of her lips, and the way she seems just as transfixed by him as he is by her. There’s a long moment of silence where their breaths intermingle, faces mere inches apart, and he feels himself nearly falling apart with the urge, the want, the _longing...._

She kisses him.

He sinks against her touch immediately, shifting so he can wrap his other arm around her waist as she secures his face in her hands. His own hands, shaking, press against her back and draw her closer, closer than they’ve ever been. Clarke murmurs his name against his mouth; it feels like a declaration in itself but he feels the need to confirm it anyway.

“I love you,” he whispers, drawing away just barely to rest his forehead against hers. His breathing is hitched.

She smiles and runs her thumbs across his cheeks; they come away wet. “I love you, too.”

The next year, Clarke does in fact get asked to draw the most important moments of the year. She gives Abby the most important ones—a renewal of their treaty with Azgeda, a new medicinal discovery, an important visit from Luna. But when he comes to give her a present for the ‘anniversary of when we figured our lives out,’ as he so fondly called it, she gives him two paintings that are just for him. One, of their first kiss, his hands clutching at her waist and her forehead brushing his; the other, of the two of them standing side-by-side, shoulders and hands brushing like they always are.

He would’ve given her an award for the best present ever, except when he pulls out _his_ present she cries, and she gets to wear it everywhere and show it off to everyone in sight, so, yeah. He’s basically already the best husband ever.

And he has their whole lives to become even better.

**Author's Note:**

> what'd you think?
> 
> @sherlockvowsontheriverstyx on tumblr <3


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